Carrer d'Avinyó: The Street Behind Les Demoiselles
Why is it significant?
Walk slowly up this narrow street of tall, peeling houses, shop shutters covered in graffiti, washing hanging from iron balconies. It looks like any lane in the old town... but its name has travelled further than any other street in Barcelona. Avinyó is simply the Catalan word for Avignon.
Key Facts
| Place | Carrer d'Avinyó: The Street Behind Les Demoiselles |
|---|---|
| Address | Carrer d'Avinyó, 08002 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.38150, 2.17690 |
| Part of Walk | Young Picasso's Barcelona: Els Quatre Gats, La Llotja & the Merchant Streets of La Ribera |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk slowly up this narrow street of tall, peeling houses, shop shutters covered in graffiti, washing hanging from iron balconies. It looks like any lane in the old town... but its name has travelled further than any other street in Barcelona. Avinyó is simply the Catalan word for Avignon.
In 1907, in his studio in Paris, Picasso painted a large, shocking canvas: five naked women, their bodies cut into sharp planes, two of them with faces like masks. He called it, among friends, his brothel. When it was finally shown in public in 1916, the critic André Salmon gave it a politer title, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the young ladies of Avignon. And according to the tradition, the Avignon in that title is not the papal city in France at all, but this street, where there was a brothel the young Picasso knew in his Barcelona years.
Nobody can point to the exact door, and nobody should pretend to. But imagine a teenager from the art school around the corner, broke, curious, wandering these lanes at night with his friends from Els Quatre Gats. Barcelona gave him a lot of things. A few of them he only painted years later, far away.
That painting, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is often called the beginning of Cubism, the moment Western painting broke with five centuries of perspective. And a few steps ahead, in the little Passatge del Crèdit just off Carrer de Ferran, another revolution was born, quite literally: Joan Miró came into the world there in 1893. Two giants of modern art, one block apart.
So this is where our walk ends: from a frieze Picasso never saw, through the café of his youth, the school of his father, the studio of his first triumph, to a street that lives on in a painting that changed art. Plaça Nova and the cathedral are a few minutes north of here. Paris gave the world Picasso... but you have just walked through the city that gave Paris the boy.